Developer Hiring Blog

As the summer winds down, this is an ideal time for your technical recruiters to prepare for one final push to fill their critical open roles. Because they face intense competition for tech talent, they’re probably laser-focused on nothing but hitting their hiring goals before the end of the year.

But for talent acquisition managers, the next few months are important for identifying priorities for 2019 and beyond. Which developer roles will you need to hire for this time next year, and what will it cost to do so?

Still, with looming deadlines remaining for the current calendar year, it’s easy to delay creating future recruitment budgets until it’s absolutely necessary. To help jumpstart your 2019 planning, here are a few benefits of starting right now.

Leading the talent acquisition function of a growing company has a lot of unique challenges. There are some days when it seems like your team will never hit its hiring goals. On other occasions, you’re feeling the pressure to reduce your tech recruitment budget while maintaining your recruiters’ current output.

But in today’s competitive market, overemphasizing cost-cutting measures could make developer hiring an even more difficult task. Not only should your recruitment goals influence your overall cost-per-technical-hire, they often justify an increase in recruitment spend.

Ever since SHRM published the first formula for calculating cost-per-hire, many executives have used this metric as an indicator of the overall success of their HR functions. When talent acquisition teams don’t hit their goals, managers still tend to look for ways to lower their recruiting expenses, even for developer roles with difficult talent markets.

You could easily find a handful of ways to slash your tech recruitment budget. But is that the right approach? While the solution to all of your developer hiring challenges isn’t always to increase spend, here are a few reasons why you shouldn’t necessarily seek to decrease it.

Executives outside of the HR function tend to scrutinize cost-per-hire because they want their colleagues in talent acquisition to find ways to reduce spend. Although an abnormally high number might be a red flag for non-technical roles, this isn’t always the case when you’re hiring developers. At best, most of the top candidates are only passively interested in new jobs—and often, your tech recruiting strategy requires a separate budget.

Taking all of these factors into consideration, it’s not difficult to see that calculating cost-per-technical-hire can be tricky. It’s even more of a challenge when you’re recruiting for a variety of developer roles. Here are a few reasons why it’s important to go the extra mile and calculate cost-per-hire for each technical position on your team’s plate.

Managing a tech recruitment budget is tricky. Creating a rough draft that accounts for a variety of line items is challenging enough, but selecting the resources that enable you to hit your goals and help your company take the next step is even more difficult. So what can you do to ensure that your tech recruiting budget aligns with your company’s overall business goals? Here are a few tips to help you get started.

A 2017 LinkedIn study found that recruiters expected to hire more with the same budgets they had the previous year, citing automation and other recruitment technologies as the primary reasons. But recruiting developers requires a unique approach, and the most effective ways to engage with potential candidates simply cannot be automated.

Still, you’re probably curious if it’s possible to hire more developers than you did in 2017, but without increasing spend in any category. There might be not be a catch-all solution to this challenge, but here are a few ways that you can optimize your tech recruitment budget to support more aggressive developer hiring targets.

Even for experienced HR leaders, it can be challenging to create, track, and manage a tech recruitment budget. In addition to the obvious things like online recruiting and applicant tracking systems, there are a lot of variables that could make or break your developer hiring strategy. Plus, without a solid plan for getting the most out of your budget, you could be left wondering where all that money went by the end of the year.

So how do you create a recruiting budget that works for you, and what should you include in it? Let’s take a look at a few critical line items that you might not be tracking today, but definitely should.

Most developers already have jobs (so they aren’t actively looking for a new one), which is why employer branding is so crucial. If your employer brand doesn’t grab a developer’s attention, they’ll quickly move on to something else. But when it’s done well, your employer branding strategy can get even the most passive candidates excited about joining your company.

There’s no one secret formula to successful employer branding. Some companies use their internal employees to create their branding content, while others only allow HR or marketing to touch it. Some companies spend thousands of dollars a month, while others don’t spend a dime. If you fall into the latter, it might be time to revisit. Here’s why.

I bet you can think of at least one time when a financial report led your company to cut costs however possible. From what I’ve seen over my career, this has led leadership teams to say to themselves, “If our team’s computers are at least turning on, that’s good enough for right now.” While it might seem like you have bigger priorities when your company isn’t flush with cash, the developers who responded to this year’s Developer Hiring Landscape made it clear that there’s a direct correlation between their overall job satisfaction and their satisfaction with their equipment. Let’s take a deeper look at the importance of a workstation—and how cutting corners on developer equipment can ultimately affect your bottom line.

It’s hard not to notice some of the incredible perks that the competition offer developers during. Considering that only 13% of developers are actively looking for new jobs, it would be easy to assume that companies need to offer trips to amusement parks and five-star dinners during the interview process just to get their attention.

But just like you wouldn’t define your company culture by your office amenities alone, tech candidates don’t choose jobs based solely on how well you spoil them during the interview process. Here are a few tips to help you create a best-in-class candidate experience for developers without breaking the bank.